On the Reverse
Why we all need to see the backside of work to learn more about culture
One of the regular activities in my travels is to visit at least one museum. Prado was my choice in Madrid. Along with the long walk in El Retiro Park, the two were the inside and outside that made the stop in the city an upside.
Three hours outside and four inside later, I felt like I had been turned inside-out myself. In a good way.
While I strolled by the pond in El Retiro, I caught a fashion photo shoot behind the monument to Alfonso XII. El Duende del Retiro complete with troll and cage was to the right of an exquisite mosaic of ceramic and cotto tiles by the entrance to the Biblioteca Pública Municipal Eugenio Trías.
The walk in the park prepared me to see on the reverse once in the museum.
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Along with the finest collections of European art, from the 12th century to the early 20th century—Francisco Goya, Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, and Diego Velázquez—I saw works by Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, Correggio, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Paolo Veronese, Rembrandt, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and many more.
Three floors filled with art and awe. The museum was also surprisingly crowded. Couples, groups of students, but also groups of friends. In a couple of spots, I was able to watch artists sanctioned by the museum copy the art on the wall.
It was as interesting to watch people take in the art and artists at work, as it was looking at the paintings. I sat by groups while they explained the story on display to each other. The best part were the students taking notes by leaning on the backs of their peers. I’m guessing they were working on an assignment.
What was going on around the art was a prelude to the special exhibit Reversos.
On the Reverse includes works from Prado’s collection and that of 29 additional national and international collections and museums.
We all put up a good front. But turn the picture around and what do we see?
The Reversos 10 rooms are all painted black. They and the 100 or so works on display made me feel like I was walking through an underground tunnel filled by secrets. I never thought about the symbolism of the cross behind stretched canvas—until I saw the pattern.
Annibale Carracci’s students sketches in black chalk behind The Ecstasy of Mary Magdalene (1585–1600), Vicente Palmaroli canvas with his notes on the hidden side. Traces of the creative process we don’t normally see—drawings, geometrical designs or expressive whimsies.
More information was written on the back—by the artist to add to the narrative, or inspire it, or added later—labels and stamps or seals that help us to tell us who they belonged to, where they’d been.
After trying to reconstruct events from various photos in a box my grandparents had, I learned to label the back of the pcitures I develop. I write the date, the location—adding the specific place with the help of maps and notes—and the names of any people in the photo. We’re confident we’ll remember, but we likely won’t.
The paper-thin images will likely fade and disappear faster, and so will the digital originals when there’s nobody around to pay the storage fees. But at least I can go back to my travels and re-discover details I forgot on the paper version. (I use the slide-in albums, not the sticky kind.)
B-sides make up the Reversos exhibition’s central section. ‘Two-sided’ works where the back has its own artistic status and complements the principal image in various ways. Some complete the story, others give you insights into deeper motives.
Imagine you’re walking by the self-portraits of Goya, Rembrandt and Van Gogh, and you come up to five battered wooden beams from the original stretcher of Picasso’s Guernica, and a devout nun baring her bottom.
The nun’s frame bears witness to its seizure by the Nazis. The canvas belonged to the Swedish ambassador to Paris who showed it only to special guests. I’ll let these two bits of information hang here with the image.
I found the exhibit curious and a tad disorienting. It challenged me to think beyond the convention. And to see multidimensional work. In some cases, the back reveals the textiles that had domestic uses or patterned weaves and contain unintentional ghosts, which appear when oil soaks into the cloth.
It turns out there’s more life into the stills than I thought. On reverses you can see the repairs, cuts and folds that sucked part of the image to face the wall.
I was not kidding when I said El Retiro prepared me for thinking about contrasts. As I walked along the Palacio de Cristal and around the parallel path, I came across the Biblioteca Pública Municipal Eugenio Trías.
Structure and symmetry on one side, complete chaos and intrigue on the other. The cage somehow makes sense next to a library. A reminder not to become imprisoned by limited thoughts, to keep expanding our mind.
We’ve become used to seeing images of people facing us, including our own. I found it refreshing to take a peak behind the curtain. Somehow, I feel I got to know a little bit more about the lives and work of actual people, rather than just celebrated artists.
References
On The Reverse, Museo del Prado
‘The Prado Museum’s New Show Reveals a Rarely Seen Side of Paintings: Their Reverse,’ Min Chen, Artnet (2023)